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I was pretty happy at the Sugar Bowl after Terry Jackson’s touchdown made it Florida 45, FSU 20—and then Terry added another to make it 52–20. A memorable night!
W inning is what makes it fun for coaches and players because it creates memories that last forever. I look back fondly at every one of the 228 college victories and 47 pro football wins as special moments to remember in my coaching career. But it’s beating rivals and winning the championships that I cherish most—especially in a powerfully competitive league like the Southeastern Conference.
The first rule of thumb, corny as it may sound, is that individual awards and recognition won’t fulfill you like team accomplishments. It’s far more rewarding to share an achievement with a team than it is to celebrate your own personal success. I told many of my former players at Florida that they should always value those SEC titles very highly.
I know I take great pride in those SEC titles as coach of the Gators. We were never able to accomplish that dream of winning the SEC at South Carolina, but we did win an Eastern Division title and finish in the Top Ten in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
Any personal accomplishments for me pale in comparison to achieving team goals that are more enjoyable when shared with those who helped achieve them. The idea is to celebrate being winners together. Championships are forever. Everybody will always remember that the 1991 Florida team was the first school in history to win an official SEC championship. And most everybody will remember the 1996 team was Florida’s first national champion. (I still say our 1990 team was our first to win the SEC. We simply were not recognized by the conference.)
Much is made about SEC rivalries stirring the passion of fans in what is considered the best college football conference in America. Truthfully, fans are passionate in the Big Ten or Big Twelve and all of the Power Five conferences. But because we pack our large stadiums down South, more weight seems to be given to the SEC. We might be shortsighted about that. But rivalries inside your division and conference are the most intense because that’s the ticket to winning the conference title and ultimately the national championship.
I have said many times that it’s often as difficult to win the SEC as it is to win the national championship. Back in 1996, when there was no playoff, the SEC schedule then was certainly tougher than any other conference. At Florida we were usually battling Tennessee for the Eastern Division supremacy when the Vols had some of their highest-ranked teams. And when we were also playing our instate rival, Florida State, they were at the peak of their run, ranked among the Top Five teams in the country thirteen of the fourteen times we played.
Our 1992 Florida team was fortunate enough to play in the first SEC championship game, which we lost to Alabama on an interception for what we hoped would be the game-clinching drive. The SEC title game created another level of competition for our league. I’d always been in favor of it, just as I supported the idea of a national tournament. Now there is a four-team playoff, which I feel is a step in the right direction. But it needs to expand.
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AT FLORIDA AND SOUTH CAROLINA we were able to hold our own pretty well against rivals. We were able to win more times than not against the likes of Georgia, Tennessee, and Clemson. Maybe we didn’t do as well against Florida State, but we won our fair share and will always have that 52–20 Sugar Bowl victory over FSU that led to Florida’s first-ever national championship.
When it came to the Gators playing Georgia—still considered by many fans as their fiercest rival—we were fortunate to win eleven out of twelve against a team that had always dominated us in the past. And when we added on the five wins the Gamecocks were able to gain over the Bulldogs, our sixteen wins over Georgia were the most ever by any other coach. Coach Ralph (Shug) Jordan of Auburn beat them fifteen times.
SPURRIER BY THE NUMBERS VS. RIVALS
At Florida
Tennessee, 8-4
Georgia, 11-1
Florida State, 5-8-1
Miami, 1-1
Total: 24-14-1
At South Carolina
Tennessee, 5-5
Georgia, 5-6
Clemson, 6-4
Combined at Florida / South Carolina
Georgia, 16-7
Tennessee, 13-9
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LEARNING HOW to win is a process, but certain people have the leadership qualities and vision to advance the cause quicker. Wisdom can be gained through experience, but it can also be acquired from others.
I found that wisdom in several places—starting with my own dad’s words, as well as reading books and adapting the philosophies of others to my own style. Plus, experiencing the trials and errors of my own journey. However, while you listen and learn from others, it’s ultimately your decisions you must live and die with. That’s why I cannot emphasize enough the importance of coaches putting their own fingerprints on their program and a team—doing it their own way and trusting their own choices.
Are winners born or made? Some people will argue both sides. For certain it takes courage to be a winner. Over the years I have compiled wisdom from many sources in lists—including my list of Winners and Losers, and how to know the difference between them. One my favorite sources is Sydney J. Harris’s book, appropriately titled Winners and Losers , which tells you how winners act and talk. A winner says: “This is the best way to do it around here.” A loser says: “That’s the way we’ve always done it around here.”
When I began my fifth head coaching job at age sixty, my goal was to be South Carolina’s winningest coach. I said that at the outset because I wanted Gamecock fans to know I was going to be there at least ten years or so—not just coach for a couple years and then leave when some big-time school came calling. I needed to win sixty-five games to do it, and by the end of year eight (2012) that goal was reached.
I began goal-setting with my teams at Duke in 1989. At South Carolina I continued to reach out for new goals, some of them very intriguing and challenging for our teams, coaches, and fans. In 2015, while writing this book, it was brought to my attention that I needed only sixteen more wins to become the only FBS coach with one hundred or more wins at two schools. But it wasn’t to be.
Still, we wound up 86-49 overall and 44-40 in the SEC after ten-plus seasons. In the previous decade at South Carolina, the Gamecocks were 46-64 overall and 28-51 in the SEC.
And then there was that “expiration date” I should have heeded.
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EVERYBODY WANTS to be a winner in life. Nobody wants to be called a loser. As a coach, it’s more than just your record. Simply adding more wins just to enhance your résumé and your own personal legacy was never what it was all about for me. My satisfaction was in charting new territory and going where the programs had rarely, if ever, been before.
I was asked by a reporter several years ago at our SEC coaches meetings in Destin, Florida, if I thought I’d ever catch Coach Bear Bryant for most victories in the SEC. Coach Bryant was 159-46-9 in SEC games while at Kentucky and Alabama. Somebody had calculated that I would need to average a little more than seven SEC wins a season for the next four seasons back then to catch him. “Had I wanted to break that record, I would have stayed at Florida,” I said to a reporter. And I meant that. However, for other reasons I have to admit in retrospect that I left Florida four or five years too early. All the pieces were in place to keep winning more championships—conference and national.
FLORIDA BEFORE SPURRIER, 1933–1989
FLORIDA WITH SPURRIER, 1990–2001
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I KEEP a long list of players and coaches I’ve admired as winners, all the way back to my youth. Being a winner is reflected in how you act, how you talk, how you compete, what you stand for in your principles, and how those core values impact others in your program and around you. Over the years I have compiled lists of wisdom from many sources. I’ve mentioned Sydney Harris’s Winners and Losers . Harris, a Chicago columnist and author, talked about the subject of winning in broader terms than just sports. If you know the difference, it’s easy to say: “If you act and talk like a winner, you’ve got a chance to be a winner. If you act like a loser and talk like a loser—good chance, you’ll be a loser.”
I have also studied the work of behavioral experts like Dr. Charles A. Garfield, who I came across when Jerri found a Success magazine article on “What Successful People Have.” Dr. Garfield, a computer analyst for the first Apollo mission to the moon, has studied and written about peak performers extensively. He talks about characteristics and traits of peak performers—highly successful people.
The most interesting thing was, he said: Almost anyone can acquire these traits. So I wrote these traits down and began to make sure I’d acquired them, or would, and I tried to get our coaches and players to acquire them, too.
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WHEN I FIRST got into coaching—and especially when I became a head coach—I was curious why some coaches and teams won more than others. Vince Lombardi was known as the best to ever coach in the NFL. In the NBA, the Boston Celtics were the best team. The New York Yankees were the best in baseball. The Yankees won with different managers—Casey Stengel, Ralph Houk, Billy Martin, and later Joe Torre. Those guys knew how to win.
And, of course, Jack Nicklaus was the best in golf. He won eighteen majors, more than anybody. He knew how to concentrate, focus, and pay attention. You never saw him when his mind was not on the game. John Wooden was without a peer in college basketball. In tennis, it was Chrissie Evert and Björn Borg.
Coach Lombardi said: “Winning isn’t everything—it’s the ONLY thing.” He also said, “When you’re on a winning streak, you’ve got to stay on players’ butts, because they can become complacent. You’ve got to find something to chew them out about a little bit. If they’re on a losing streak, you’ve got to lighten up a little, maybe shake things up.” When we lost four out of five in 2014, we adopted the theme of the Taylor Swift song “Shake It Off.” We did, and won three of our last four.
Doing it differently? When I say “differently,” it doesn’t mean you ignore history or that you can’t learn from proven winners. I mean that you study successful people and see how it fits what you do. You can’t outright replicate somebody else’s success, but you can sure learn from them and put your own twist on things. It’s not a given, however, that because you are around highly successful people you can soak up all the knowledge and do it yourself.
In the South during my lifetime, we looked up to Coach Bear Bryant as the best, and his record proved it, as he was the third-all-time winningest coach, with 323 wins. I was recruited by Coach Bryant and competed against his team when I was at Florida. He knew about winners and winning and was a big proponent of passion. Coach Bryant was a planner, as you can see in this version I obtained of his “Three Rules of Coaching”:
I really like number 2. So many coaches look for size, speed, strength. But the real coaches look for the guys who know how to play the game, make the plays when the game is on the line. Effort. Smarts. There are all kinds of other identifiers for winners.
As for number 3, you do need a plan for everything, every day, and need to make it work. I think Coach Urban Meyer is one of those guys who has a plan for everything. When he watched Auburn run that missed field goal back against Alabama, he said, “We never worked on that. Now we work on it every week, just in case. If the other team tries a field goal, it can be run back.”
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SOME OF THE BEST SOURCES for me have been great books, including Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts and The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I started reading Coach Wooden’s books in the early 1990s. And I have an old tape recording of one of his speeches where he talks about his pyramid of success and his philosophies about coaching. I’ve incorporated a lot of his wisdom in what I tried to teach.
I consider Coach Wooden to be as wise as any coach ever. Why was he so successful? It wasn’t because he was more intelligent than the other guy. He did his share of hard work, but he didn’t waste a lot of extra hours or work longer than his competition.
These are some of my favorite Wooden-isms:
Number 7 is one of my favorites, and I have used it many times over the years. People wonder why I have often substituted quarterbacks. I once benched a guy who was going to win the Heisman—Danny Wuerffel. I even rotated quarterbacks every other play at Florida with Doug Johnson and Noah Brindise back in 1997.
When people criticized me for frequently changing quarterbacks, I always said that they change pitchers in baseball all the time, which is why they have a bullpen. Some days maybe a guy just doesn’t have his best stuff. I’ve also used the bench to send a message to a player who was not playing his best “within the framework for what’s best for the team.”
High-fiving quarterback Doug Johnson after we beat No. 1 FSU at the Swamp in 1997. Doug alternated with Noah Brindise in one of the most exciting games ever played on Florida Field.
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THERE ARE ALSO times in defeat when you can learn something that will make you and your team better down the road, or as it is said by Attila the Hun, “Live again to fight another day.” That is one of the many principles of Attila, whose strategies I have studied—as have other coaches and many prominent businessmen and businesswomen. Attila, a ruthless and aggressive warrior born around 406 A.D. in what is now Hungary, became the king of the Hunnic Empire and terrorized the Roman Empire by devastating lands from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
I often refer to other Attila strategies, but the one I like most from him is: “A leader must use and apply massive common sense in solving every problem.”
I had a guy ask me: “How have you lasted so long?” I said, “Well, I don’t irritate the president or the AD if I can help it. I try to get along with everybody.” Obviously, you gotta win. But I try to use common sense in every little situation. It was key to my lasting as long as I did in the coaching profession.
There are many more excellent Attila-isms I have referred to over the years, even early in my coaching career. Some my other favorites are:
The Art of War by Sun Tzu is also popular among many coaches, and most of us have pored over the wisdoms of the famous Chinese general. Some apply, some don’t, but I think we can all agree that the simplicity of his wisdom is most refreshing.
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YOU MAY GATHER wisdom from around the world, but you can’t beat the homegrown teachings of your coaches and parents. I always hearken back to my days as a young athlete when my dad taught me that the goal is to win. I have told the story many times about what my father said as the head manager of our Thomas Products Babe Ruth baseball team after our first practice, because it underscores my core value about Winners and Losers and has remained close to my heart ever since I was a teenager: The reason they keep score is to determine who won and who lost. Much of my desire to be a winner was instilled in me by my dad, the Rev. J. Graham Spurrier Jr.
A commitment to the principle of winning is pretty much why and how I have lived my life as an athlete and a coach. Yes, there are times when you have given your best, and the other team was just better that day. But what my father was saying was that the purpose of playing is to win—not just to try hard. When you compete, winning must be the priority for winners. If you have committed to giving everything you have and still lose, then you have to acknowledge that the other team was the winner that day. And as I look back at my life, growing up in Tennessee and winding up choosing Florida as my college, I know for sure my path was being directed. My friends predicted I would play baseball and basketball, as I did in high school. In football, I developed more slowly. I wasn’t even a quarterback at first. Raised a Tennessee football fan and having lived most of my life about a hundred miles from Knoxville, by rights I guess I should have been a Vol. But other forces were clearly at work, because none of it turned out that way.